An unsustainable emotion

Sam Gross, 1998, The New Yorker

At an Arts and Fancy paper store on a Saturday morning, I came across this cartoon on a greeting card and instantly broke out into unbridled sputtering laughter. I had seen this cartoon years ago when I was in grad school and to see it again after all these years felt wonderful. This unique cartoon had managed make me laugh. However, it wasn’t the joyous kind but more of a painful twangs my heart-string kind.

A cartoon about two snails and a tape dispenser had managed to convey the rawness of love that many of best of poems or dramatic cinemas hadn’t. And before we go any further, I must make it clear that I am well aware of the different forms of love. What I plan to write about doesn’t deal with the motherly or the family kind of love where blood line seems to be the undying form of attachment. Nor am I going to be talking about my analogous love for cars. I wish to write about the love between two human beings that aren’t related in any manner but through a sense of unexplainable attraction.

Take the snail for that matter. His love for the tape dispenser might be because of her perfect shiny shape. Maybe he was smitten by her smell of the scotch tape mist. Whatever the reason may be, his statement clearly illustrates the definition of love. That he doesn’t care what he gets back in return from her but he still just loves her. He is least concerned that she is likely to never reciprocate his feelings. He is completely aloof of the fact that she isn’t just slow but rather cannot move ever. And he cannot be bothered by the fact that one day, some ‘human’ is likely to whisk the love of his life to an another desk or perhaps even worse, to a trash can.

It is this unadulterated, no-expectation based, powerful emotion that is love. Where nothing is rationalized and where nothing is measured. It is pure to an extent that it can be acidic through all bonds of reasonability. And if you have ever loved a tape dispenser before you would know exactly what I mean.

I am struggling to understand though if love really is the answer to togetherness. An emotion is so gut wrenching its sustainable effects would be devastating. It analogous to the first gear in the transmission; it offers large amounts of torque but cannot be maintained as the speed of the engine increases. Some people are lucky to find second and third gears in their love stories but the ones that really make the journey are the ones who find an emotion not based on the flammability of love.

I count myself really lucky that I have had the pleasure of loving a tape dispenser. And even if I can’t fathom it completely, I thank my stars that I was able to move past that, however ungainly that transition was. For those who cannot relate to what I write here, you should just feel lucky all around. I am convinced that stable relationships aren’t based on undying love but rather on some other variables which I best avoid getting into, here.

By definition, true love can never be sustainable. If it were, it wouldn’t be special in any way. And I don’t want to get in a debate with those who believe that I am wrong about this since there isn’t a neutral scientific way of proving who is right and wrong. I hope for the sake of poetry and fiction that true lovers find true lovers who reciprocate in the true love fashion, forever. But for my sake, I have made peace with the fact that once or twice of this true love nonsense was probably enough.

What I really need, isn’t a shiny glitzy tape dispenser, but rather just another snail who found the same joke, just as funny an poignant, as I did. From there on, it is just slow snailing baby.